That’s the best excuse I can come up with for the lack of posts since my last entry. You can throw “traveling a lot” into the big bag of excuses but if anything that should sway me towards more posting and not less. I’m not much of a writer (hence the non-writer prefix) however the little that I did write was blocked by something inside me. Probably my inherent laziness. My whole life I have “left things to the last minute” – school assignments, studying for exams, etc etc. So when you put something with no official deadline in front of me (like, say, writing a blog entry) then once it gets beyond the point of being routine I continue to push it further and further down the list of priorities until oops 6 weeks have passed.

I’m home now though and have a bit more free time than while we were away (that seems backwards..) so here’s to hoping this was the last time my blogging desires went wayward.

A lot has happened since my last post. Both poker-wise and outside of poker. The short version was a lot of poker in June (including a large downswing, throw that into the excuses bag too will ya). A friend, fellow blogger and SNE legend Andrew Li aka azntracker moved to Sydney so we hung out a bit — it included some fun BBQing, drinking and silly poker games. What else do poker players do when they get together anyway? At the end of the month my brother and his gf came to stay with us for a few days and we had a blast.

July saw Puneet and I head off to the US for a semi-holiday semi-poker trip. First stop San Diego where my sister lives with her husband and my 5 year old niece. The day we arrived was her birthday so we had amazing fun opening presents with her and enjoying the wonderful weather by/in the pool in their beautiful new home. Unfortunately we could only stay one night as the next day I was playing the 5k PLO8 event in Vegas. Long story short for that event is that I made two dinner breaks but didn’t cash. The only other event I played was the main which I’ll write up separately but I was out of that in about 5 hours. The rest of Vegas was amazing fun — the group of people we had to hang out with couldn’t have been better. I’ll go into more detail of Vegas stories in another post too.

After Vegas was Mehico! We flew into Cancun and took a trip down to a small tourist beach side town called Playa Del Carmen. It was AMAZING. Again, I will go into more details in another post (gee, I have a lot to catch up on) but as a sneak peak here’s a photo of the view from the roof terrace of our room:

The whole Mexico trip was unreal. From the food to the snorkling to the pools to the beaches to the people to the weather to the Mayan ruins to the resort. Incredible.

After Mexico we had a one day layover in LA before our 15 hour flight back to Sydney. Not to miss out on another day worth of adventuring we met up with one of our friends Gavin and stayed in Santa Monica. Had a great time in LA and now we’re home. It’s definitely a bittersweet feeling — on the one hand we miss being on holidays but on the other it’s definitely good to be back to normality.

I’m now back in grindathon mode. I want to make SNE by the end of November to keep a cruisy December – unlike last year where I hit the millionth vpp with hours (if not minutes) to spare. The will require a solid 50hrs a week for the next 4 months — doable, for sure, but draining. Especially if you include a few days off here and there it quickly adds up to 9-10hr days which any poker player will tell you is no easy feat.

My next several updates will include (in no specific order): a poker update, a Sydney update, a Vegas update, a Mexico update, an LA update and maybe a couple of random things mixed in. So as not to burn myself out (see Roy, this wasn’t that hard) I’m going to end this here and leave you all with one of my favourite photos of the trip:

Snorkling in Akumal Bay, Mexico, we saw this sea turtle underwater. He had under him two yellow fishies that followed him wherever he went - whether it be to eat some sea grass or head to the surface for air.

p.s I just saw that this was meant to be the short version! god knows what the long one will look like.